Air Pollution May Damage Brain Health
Air pollution may damage brain health – According to a new study, dirty city air can age the brain by almost a year.
Elissa Wilker, the lead author of the study, is an instructor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and a researcher at the Cardiovascular Epidemiological Research Unit at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She and her team looked at MRI scans of 943 adults done between 1995 and 2005. The adults were healthy, did not have dementia, and had not suffered from strokes. The scans were done for another study. The team then correlated information from the scans to pollution data from satellite observations.
Researchers found that adults living in the most polluted areas of the city had a 46% higher risk of mini-strokes and a 0.32% reduction in brain volume, when compared to those living in the least polluted areas. While the team does not know how the damage occurs, they theorize that breathing polluted air can cause inflammation in the body, starting from the lungs and spreading to the brain.
While they may not kill people, mini-strokes can seriously damage the quality of life, according to Dr. Beate Ritz, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. Such strokes are dangerous for another reason: most would attribute symptoms such as dizziness and poor vision to aging than to strokes, and ignore them.
Category: News
